1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and method, a program, and an information processing system. In particular, an information processing apparatus and method, a program, and an information processing system in which preference information of a user can be easily shared.
2. Description of the Related Art
Up to now, an invention has been proposed related to so-called content personalization for searching and recommending a content such as a television program and a music on the basis of a preference of a user (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-194107).
For the content personalization, a method referred to as Collaborative Filtering (hereinafter, which is referred to as CF method) or a method referred to as Collaborative Based Filtering (hereinafter, which is referred to as CBF method) are widely used.
According to the CF (Collaborative Filtering) method, purchase histories of the respective users are managed. For a user to which a content is to be recommended, another user having a similar purchase history is detected, and a content which has been purchased by the other user but has not been purchased by the relevant user is recommended. For example, the CF method is utilized in a mail-order marketing site on the internet.
According to the CBF (Content Based Filtering) method, metadata previously assigned to a content on a distribution side or a sales side is directly utilized for an extraction of a preference or a recommendation of a content. That is, a distance between a characteristic vector representing a preference of a user and a characteristic vector of the respective candidate music pieces (cosine correlation or the like) is calculated, the music having the short distance as a result of the calculation is regarded to be matching to the preference of the user, and this music is recommended.